Eliciting Middle School Students’ Ideas About Graphs Supports Their Learning from a Computer Model

Eliane Wiese, University of California, Berkeley

Anna Rafferty, Carleton University

Marcia Linn, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

When middle school students learn science content with graphs, the
graphing and science knowledge may be mutually reinforcing: understanding the
science content may help students interpret a related graph, and information from
a graph may illustrate a scientific concept. We examine this relationship between
graphing and science by studying how students learn from interactive computer
models with accompanying data graphs. The computer models provide an animated
simulation that illustrates an unobservable phenomenon, while the data graph
tracks one or more quantities over time. This ordering study, on middle school
students learning about photosynthesis, indicates that engaging with novel graph
concepts helped students interpret their data as they experimented with the
computer model. The study also provided some support for the opposite direction:
experimenting with the model first helped students make sense of the graphs.